Poems and poetics

for Rex Chirot & Jerome Rothenberg

El Colonel is smiling, writing with his cigarette’s smoke in that great page, the sky . . . that great page, ever open to all, in which all eyes may read---and there, their readings being writings . . . find also the writings of others . . . moving, living, in skies of their own among these sometimes shared skies, these skies sometimes encountering each other . . . these writings, readings readers & writers . . . meeting among these skies . . . so that—

[It was during our transition into the fabled 1960s that it began to feel that everything we wanted for poetry was now becoming possible. I’ve written about much of this before, but a curious moment for me was the one time, in 1965, that I allowed myself to write a whole poem in a language other than English. The occasion was the fourth anniversary issue of El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn), the revolutionary poetry magazine that Margaret Randall & Sergio Mondragón co-founded in 1962 & carried forward for most of the following decade. I was inv

[The following excerpt from a longer work by the Paris-born Brazilian scholar Marcel de Lima Santos gives a capsule view of the role played by Alcheringa & its contributors & predecesors in the early development of a workable ethnopoetics. (J.R.)]

[The excerpt below is from a collection of Federman’s writings, Carcasses, published by BlazeVOX Books shortly before his death in October 2009. It was first posted on Poems and Poetics, blogger version, on February 28th of that year.]

Yesterday I bought a new tape recorder – and today I recorded a story on my new recorder – this is the story – I call it –

ABOUT POEMS AND POETICS: In this age of internet and blog the possibility opens of a free circulation of works (poems and poetics in the present instance) outside of any commercial or academic nexus. I will therefore be posting work of my own, both new & old, that may otherwise be difficult or impossible to access, and I will also, from time to time, post work by others who have been close to me, in the manner of a freewheeling on-line anthology or magazine. I take this to be in the tradition of autonomous publication by poets, going back to Blake and Whitman and Dickinson, among numerous others.